O n May 3 there was live poetry in Exclusive Books. It may not have been a first, but it was loud. Hundreds of noisy youths gathered in Hyde Park’s upmarket shopping mall for a recital by one of the country’s spirited new literary voices — television presenter-turned-poet Lebogang Mashile.
Her first poetry volume, In a Ribbon of Rhythm (Oshun), forms part of Exclusive Books’s annual Homebru promotion. The occasion was the Homebru launch. For book lovers it provides a good opportunity for a literary stocktake. How far have our writers come in the democratic society, and where are they going?
Journalist-turned-novelist-turned-government official Sandile Memela launched the Homebru bash with a provocative keynote address. His novel Flowers of the Nation (University of KZN Press) forms part of the selection of 21 indigenous books.
In his speech Memela told writers, “There is no sitting on the fence any more, the writer must take a stand. Every creative intellectual must tell their audience who they are. We must make our voices heard.”
Minutes later Mashile, with her band of funksters, did exactly that. Mashile must have learnt something from her months as a presenter of the television series L’Attitude. As a performer she is in control. Even in a bookshop of snack-eating, drinking hordes.
As a live poet Mashile cut her teeth in the spoken word collective Feelah Sista, a group of women who used poetry to interrogate their standing in society. The group disbanded some months ago, but Mashile has continued to perform her poetry “on stages, in university halls, at bars”. Now she has the chance to take the poems she has written over the past five years to another platform.
“Not everything that is written lends itself to performance,” says Mashile. “But this book gives me the opportunity to include those pieces that I can’t do at, say, the Bassline, like Tomorrow’s Daughters, or Love Is Elastic, because they don’t have the performance energy. Those who know me as a performance poet will get to see another side of me.”
Though it may now come in a more tangible form, Mashile’s poetry, like the books collected for Homebru, is deeply personal. It’s about Mashile discovering her fears and hopes, her vices and virtues. She adds: “There are definite pieces about other people, inspired by events and places I’ve found myself in.”
While articulating her experiences as a strong and striving young, black woman, Mashile encourages others to follow suit — to seek the truth about themselves and others, and live according to that truth.
Addressing the silent parts of history is one of the motives that drove Mtutulezi Nyoka, a practising doctor, to pen his novel I Speak to the Silent (University of KZN Press). “Some of the most important stories I have heard were told next to a fire or under a tree amidst the darkness of our homes and villages. I often felt, as a little boy, that some of them deserved a far bigger audience.”
Nyoka’s book arises from a desire to impart his knowledge of people and places of the past to a wider audience. It is a desire he shares with the protagonist of his novel, Walter Hambile Kondile. Kondile, a simple man by his own admission, is compelled to tell the story that led to his imprisonment. It is the tale of Kondile seeking his exiled activist daughter, set against a very real history of apartheid. Nyoka shares the part of South Africa’s past that compels him.
The tale is also a tribute to those young people who went to war for the struggle, a “monument in words for their gallantry”.
Nyoka believes we should never forget their efforts for we, as South Africans, are the children of their sacrifices.
Nyoka, like his character Kondile, feels urged to speak to those who are silenced by their youth and inexperience, or those who have the experience but remain unspoken on the issues at hand. He believes “my history and your history are indeed one history”.
Without knowing each other’s history, we cannot look to our future. Literature, he believes, is one important way to build on to the history already accumulated. It means acknowledging those who have gone before — across the colour divide. “Even when I refer to the African writers who have inspired me, I cannot mention Es’kia Mphahlele, Chinua Achebe and Mongane Wally Serote, and leave out Nadine Gordimer, André P Brink and John M Coetzee.”
Mashile, too, acknowledges those who have gone before her and those who have guided her in her claim for identity. “My favourite definition of poetry, and I come back to this daily, is what Keorapetse Kgositsile said at a workshop for Urban Voices in 2002: ‘Poetry is the highest register of language as experienced through the texture of life.'”